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June 26, News Release. December 20, Dispatches. He began life as an academic, studying literature and philosophy, and received his PhD from Beijing Normal University. When the Tiananmen pro-democracy movement began in , he was a visiting scholar at Columbia University in the US. He flew back in April of that year to take part in the protests that grew into the biggest challenge to China's one-party communist government since it came to power in But the protests came to a bloody end on 4 June as authorities ordered in troops to quash the demonstrations.
Mr Liu and others were credited with saving the lives of a few hundred protesters when the activists successfully negotiated with troops to allow a peaceful exit.
Though he was offered asylum in Australia, he turned it down, choosing instead to stay in China. He was subsequently arrested and jailed for "counter-revolutionary propaganda and incitement".
As a consequence, he wrote, he lost his "beloved lectern" and could no longer publish essays or give talks in China. After his release from prison in , Mr Liu campaigned for those imprisoned for their roles in the Tiananmen movement, which saw him re-arrested and sentenced to three years in a labour camp.
In , while still in prison, he married Liu Xia, a poet and artist for whom he later described his love as "boundless". Once his term was served, he continued with his activism even as authorities blocked him from working as a university lecturer and banned his books in China. Chinese state censorship meant he was far better known in the West than in his home country. Speaking to BBC Chinese in , he described reforming China as a "long and tortuous process" founded in the efforts of the people.
Then came the move that led to his longest - and final - prison sentence. In , he and a group of intellectuals helped to draft a manifesto called Charter The document called for a series of reforms in China, including a new constitution and legislative democracy, and respect for human rights.
The charter appeared to be the last straw for the government. Two days before the manifesto was due to be published online, police raided Liu Xiaobo's home and took him away. He was held in detention for a year before he was tried in court. Then, on Christmas Day in , he was jailed for 11 years. A year later, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. No wonder China's leaders are as afraid of him in death as they were in life. The Chinese Communist Party was once a party of conviction, with martyrs prepared to die for their cause, but it's had nearly 70 years in power to become an ossified and cynical establishment.
It imprisons those who demand their constitutional rights, bans all mention of them at home and uses its economic might abroad to exact silence from foreign governments. Under President Xi, China has pursued this repression with great vigour and success. Liu Xiaobo is a rare defeat. Beijing's problem began in when he won a Nobel Peace Prize. The last in that list may be unfamiliar to some, but to Beijing he's a particularly uncomfortable parallel. Carl von Ossietzky was a German pacifist who won the Nobel Peace Prize while incarcerated in a concentration camp.
Hitler would not allow a member of the laureate's family to collect the award on his behalf. Liu Xiaobo was also serving a prison sentence for subversion when he won the peace prize. Beijing would not let his wife collect the award and instead placed her under house arrest. Liu Xiaobo was represented at the award ceremony in Oslo by an empty chair and the comparisons began between 21st Century China and s Germany. Strict censorship is another shared feature of both cases.
For a time China even banned the search term "empty chair". So he has been an embarrassment to China internationally, but at home few Chinese are aware of him.
Even as foreign doctors contradicted the Chinese hospital on his fitness to travel, and Hong Kong saw vigils demanding his release, blanket censorship in mainland China kept the public largely ignorant of the dying Nobel laureate in their midst. Selective amnesia is state policy in China and from Liu Xiaobo's imprisonment until his death, the government worked hard to erase his memory.
To make it hard for family and friends to visit, he was jailed nearly miles from home. His wife Liu Xia was shrouded in surveillance so suffocating that she gradually fell victim to mental and physical ill health. Beijing punished the Norwegian government to the point where Oslo now shrinks from comment on Chinese human rights or Liu Xiaobo's Nobel prize.
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